As the use of mobile technology grows, individuals may increasingly utilize their personal computing devices in workplace environments. For example, employees who take advantage of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies may use private cell phones, PDAs, and/or laptops for both business-related and personal communications, data storage, etc.
As a result, many users may install work-related applications onto their personal devices. Some work-related applications (e.g., scheduling applications) may request permission to access certain types of information (e.g., contacts in a phonebook) on the user's device. Unfortunately, traditional privacy control systems may operate on an “all-or-nothing” basis. For example, if an application requests access to a user's phonebook, an operating system may either allow access to every contact or it may prevent access to every contact. As such, granting permission to access requests may allow applications to access both work-related and private content (e.g. pictures, contact information of family members, etc.) that users may not want made accessible in the workplace. Alternatively, granting access rights to an application that is primarily intended for personal use may also allow the application to access potentially sensitive work data (e.g., confidential information). Thus, conventional privacy control systems may not allow users to safely and privately operate various types of work and personal applications on a single computing device. As such, the current disclosure identifies and addresses a need for more efficient and effective systems and methods for customizing privacy control systems.